55. Biennale – Padiglione sloveno

Jasmina Cibic rappresenta la Slovenia alla Biennale di Venezia col progetto For Our Economy and Culture.

Comunicato stampa

Jasmina Cibic is the artist selected to represent Republic of Slovenia at the 55th Venice Biennale, with an exhibition curated by Tevž Logar and titled For our Economy and Culture.The theme of the project is the same of Biennale, the Encyclopedic Palace, seen as a point of departure to build upon the concept of its utopic nature and absence of a selection process. The artist stresses the (possible) censorships that are inherent to the very form of an exhibition of this kind and that point to an acute stance in national iconography's framing strategies.Like for her usual works, always site and context-specific, Jasmina Cibic uses a similar methodologies for this project, focusing on the architectural framework of the pavilion that was at first a private residence, and creating a dialogue between this intimate experience and the one related to the public use of the space. The artist proposes an immersive installation taking over the whole exhibition space, which by evoking strategies of official state architecture reformats the pavilion as a boudoir. Its elements include two films, which dramatize the contradictions inherent in the transmutation of national identity from past to present. The interior of the pavilion is covered with images of an endemic Slovene beetle, a failed national icon that is almost completely extinct solely because of its ideologically charged name, Anophthalmus hitleri. The work functions as a dialogue between this ideological framing of nationhood and its re-presentation.